My Number One Issue - by Arnold Kling - In My Tribe
This was the opening question from a speaker/facilitator at an event I recently attended. The small audience consisted primarily of people who work at Jewish-oriented non-profits. Those of you who know about my prejudice against non-profits can appreciate that I felt uncomfortable and out of place the whole time.
The answer that came to me was “college campuses.” In context, the speaker heard that as concern with anti-Israel demonstrations. I said that this was only a small subset of my worries, but I did not have time to go into my broader and deeper issues with higher education.
I can pinpoint the exact moment when I started to lose sleep over higher education in America. This was in the Spring of 2012, at my daughter’s graduation ceremony at Brandeis University. The main graduation speaker was in the midst of a not-memorable talk when she said “and I read this morning in the New York Times that America will be more than 50 percent non-white by 2050.”
To me, this would have been a straightforward observation, neither good news nor bad news. But the students greeted it as if they had just heard that their favorite sports team had won a championship or their favorite political party had won an election. They whooped and hollered and cheered for several minutes. It was by far the biggest applause line of her entire speech.
